NWR feature - Three Steps to Becoming a Photographer

Here's the very last thing that I'll ever do as part of my course at Winchester. It's been sweet. Link to article at the New Winchester Review.




Photography is now a more accessible hobby than ever before, providing you've got some time and a few hundred pounds to spare. While film cameras may have a certain prestige and have become something of a reserve for purists, digital cameras have some useful innovations and the ability to store thousands of photographs without the need for expensive rolls of film and a dark room full of poisonous chemicals to develop them in. Becoming a photographer will completely change your world view; it will allow you to appreciate small details that you might otherwise miss and identify beauty in situations that might otherwise be incredibly bleak (read up on the Afghan Girl for a great example of that.)

Step one - choosing your kit

It's essentially a choice between a DSLR (digital single lens reflex) or a compact camera. Which one you should get depends on what you want to do - if you want to point, click and not worry about settings then a compact is the one for you. If you would like more creative control then a DSLR is the better option.

Compact	DSLR
Cheap < £100	Expensive > £400
Light	Heavy
Easy to use	Requires more training
Not customisable – self contained. Some modifications exist but they can be bulky and imprecise	Customisable – can swap out lenses and extend its working life and functionality, attach external light sources, etc
Limited settings – most will be automatic	Full control over settings
Low maintenance, durable	High maintenance – requires cleaning to remove dust
Not good in low light conditions	Great in low light conditions
Slow to respond – can miss shots	Fast – captures an image almost immediately after pressing the shutter

Step two - what you need to know

Here are some core principles of photography and image composition that you should be aware of.

The rule of thirds

The rule of thirds is the concept that, for whatever reason, the human eye finds it more comfortable to look at an image that is intersecting these imaginary lines than an image that is dead centre.

Image credits Adam Browning

Applying this to a picture of a landscape would result in a picture that is two thirds sea and one third land or vice versa. This isn't an absolute rule and you're encouraged to break it but it's the easiest way to make an image look well composed, balanced and professional.

Focus

Focus in a camera emulates what the lens in your eye does when focussing on an object. The focus can be adjusted so that one point of the shot is crisp while the rest is blurry.

Image credits Adam Browning

However, it's not that simple. Focus is dependant on aperture and depth of field, elements which relate to camera exposure.


Exposure

Exposure is the amount of light that your image is exposed to. Whether it is under-exposed (too dark), over-exposed (too light) or correctly exposed depends on three things: aperture, ISO and shutter speed. Both under and over exposures are bad because fine details are lost and even though the picture can be 'saved' in a graphics program, the over all quality is poor. Getting the exposure right takes practice.

Aperture

Aperture is the amount of light that the camera lets through the lens - it's like the pupil in your eye. It is represented on your camera as something called an 'f-stop' and you'll see it rendered as f/1.4, f/9.8, etc. The smaller that number is, the wider the opening. Conversely, the larger the number, the narrower the opening.

You can expand or contract this opening depending on the kind of shot you want to take. To take a landscape shot, you'll need a larger f-stop number/narrower opening to ensure a deep 'depth of field', which will capture the maximum amount of detail.


On the other end of the scale, an extreme close up requires a smaller f-stop number and a wider aperture opening. This creates a shallow depth of field, where one point is in focus and the rest is blurry. However, on this picture of a damselfly, a narrow aperture was used to compensate for the magnification of the lens. The red ring shows roughly where the boundary of the aperture opening was in the camera that took the picture. Inside of the ring the image is sharp; everything outside of the ring is blurry.

Shutter speed

Shutter speed is the amount of time that the camera allows the light to come in and be recorded. You might also hear it referred to as a 'long' or 'short' exposure. It is measured in seconds (or fractions of seconds.) You would use a fast shutter speed to capture action shots, like at a football match. Another example is in nature documentaries where you might see a slow motion sequence of a hummingbird flapping its wings - the shutter speed would have to have been extremely fast in order the capture the detail in each individual shot without it looking blurred. A slow shutter speed will produce photographs which look 'smooth'. Two identical scenes are compared below:

Faster shutter speed - 1/5th of a second

Slower shutter speed - 110 seconds

ISO

ISO is the amount of work that the processor in your camera is putting in to negotiate the effects of low light. A higher ISO number will increase the sensitivity of the camera sensor, but unfortunately it'll also make the image look grainy. If the light is fine, then the ISO number should be kept as low as possible. ISO exists as trade off between being able to take a picture in dark conditions and image quality, if you need it.

Step three - finding something that you care about enough to photograph

This last step can be the most difficult. Adam Browning, who has taken the pictures used in this article, specialises in macro images of insects. He does this because he says that insects and their adaptations fascinate him and that he enjoys capturing them in detail. Your passion might not be creepy crawlies - it could be sprawling landscapes, animals or other people. The only way to find out is to get out there and start taking pictures; it doesn't even matter if they aren't that good. Just make sure that you always have your camera on you - you never know when you might stumble across something interesting.

Notes - image licensing 

Girl with camera 

Compact camera

DSLR camera

Adam Browning's photographs used with permission - http://500px.com/adambrowning

Confessional Interview: Life with a Cleft Lip

Watch the video here:

As I meet Lizzie Cooper outside Winchester train station in the April sunshine, she strikes me as happy, articulate and beams at me as she describes her soon-to-be-husband. But had you known her at the tender age of 15, by her own admissions she would have been nearly unrecognisable. She was bitter, angry and withdrawn - a description that could match just about every other teenager in the history of the world. But she perhaps had a better reason than most for feeling so down.

Lizzie as a newborn

Lizzie was born with a cleft lip and palette, a condition where parts of the mouth do not form properly in the womb. The result is a facial disfigurement which can, after several rounds of surgery, be rendered completely unnoticeable. She spent her formative years in and out of surgery and in the waiting rooms of various consultants. She has had eight operations in total – the first when she was four months old, the last when she was 22. She hates hospitals but, as a child, accepted that these are the cards she had been dealt. The bullying and rude comments from strangers, however, were a little bit harder to handle.

She tells me about her first day at school. “I came home and I sat my mum down and I said, “Mummy, what’s wrong with my face? Kids keep asking me what’s wrong with my face.’”

She says that her mum told her that she should go back and tell the other children that she would be able to get a “designer” nose when she grew up, whereas they would be stuck with whatever they had. It didn’t do anything to stop the bullying, she says, but it gave her a mechanism to cope with it; it gave her some hope in the form of thinking that whatever made her stick out could one day be ‘fixed’.

Four year-old Lizzie

It wasn’t just other children she had to be wary of, but adults too. “I remember them pointing out my face to kids, ‘Look darling, look at that girl, look at the way she looks.’ Society as a whole can be quite judgemental if you look different. Looking back as an adult that made me really quite angry, but as a kid it just made me want to cry. I hate it when adults can be judgemental because adults should know better.”

She hesitates for a bit, and then says that if she has kids, she would never raise them in such a way. “I’ve been there and I’ve done that and it’s not a nice thing to be judged on how you look. It’s shallow and it’s stupid.”

I ask her about family, and she says that they were very supportive and up front about the kind of challenges that she would have to face in her life. She feels lucky. “They never made me feel like it was something wrong with me.”

She tells me a story of a man she knows from CLAPA, the Cleft Lip and Palette Association, of which she is an active member. She says that this man was not as lucky as her, and that his father never accepted him. The dad apparently had turned round to his mother when has was born and told the mother that their son must have gotten it from her side of the family. Lizzie tells me that he had been an extremely bitter man for most of his life, and that this was the root of it.

Bitterness seems to be a recurring theme. In a previous phone conversation, Lizzie told me that she was absolutely fine about having a cleft but that some people had “real chips on their shoulders” about it. I ask her what she meant by that. “I think some people ask why they were even born like this and why couldn’t their parents have taken the opportunity and just have gotten rid of them before they came in to this world.”

She says it’s definitely a case of “why me”, especially in the situation that occurs when a person with a cleft has reached self-acceptance, but is still being bullied for looking different. Lizzie’s breaking point was the second year of university. She was sick of feeling the way she did and sought some counselling. The first session made her feel much better – she cried, she shouted, but she felt lighter.

Lizzie and husband Chris

This was the point when her life began to turn around. Working through some of her deep-seated issues about her foul treatment at the hands of other people had done her some good, but meeting her fiancé helped, too. “It was quite alien to me that someone could find me attractive because I didn’t view myself that way. He definitely helped open my eyes in seeing that I’m not the monster I sometimes see in the mirror, that there are qualities in me that are worth something.”

She describes the state that she finds her life in now as a “nice shock.” She tells me that as a 15 year old, she had already resigned herself to a lonely and bleak existence. She believed that she might never go to university, get a job or get married. But she says that despite the heartache, she would not change anything about her life. It has shaped who she is and she is happy with who she has become. “I’m content. I’m quite happy with life in general, you know, it could always be better. But at the end of the day, I feel quite proud of being a ‘clefty ‘, as we know ourselves, and I’m absolutely fine with it. I’m in a job that pays, I’ve got a little flat with my other half and I'm about to get married, so life is good.”

Basingstoke Gazette - A Day in the Life of News

As part of our degree, Dan Mackrell and I had to film a 'Day in the Life of News' to contribute to a bigger documentary shot by our entire year group. Here is our day at the Basingstoke Gazette.

Magazine module editor interview: 360 Gamer

Hello - it's been a long time since I posted anything here, so why not break the spell with something mandatory?

As part of the assessment for our magazine journalism module, we had to interview the editor(s) of any magazine of our choice and edit it in to a ten minute video.

Being the big old nerd that I am, I chose 360 Gamer, a mag that reviews Xbox games and has two co-editors running the show. I trekked up to their respective home offices and asked them about what it was like to do their jobs.

This is one of the last things that I'll ever do for my degree, and I'm reasonably happy with it, but you should probably watch it for yourself.

(God forgive me for the cheesy music. It was either this weird 80s synth or some sad piano music. I actually kind of like it.)